a broken arm

I remember I broke my arm in junior high. We had two tetherball posts in the school yard.  The game was fun, but physically challenging. The area was sand pit with a tall metal pole in the center.  Tetherball is a game for two opposing players. I was playing against a guy bigger named Cullen. He outweighed my by at least 30 lbs and he was taller too.  The equipment consists of a stationary metal pole, from which a volley ball is hung on a rope, or “tether”. The two players stand on opposite sides of the pole. Each player tries to hit the ball one way; one clockwise, and one counterclockwise. I was chubby and not really able to reach up high or jump up to block the ball from spinning around the pole. But I could hit it hard.  The game ends when one player manages to wind the ball all the way around the pole so that it is stopped by the rope. To me, height was the key to winning the game.  Cullen and I played and he was winning, no big surprise. The game got heated and several times we wrestled over control of the ball.  We would jump and try to hit the ball in our respective opposite directions.  I knew I may lose, but I kept trying.  At one point, we both jumped up to intercept the ball as it spun around the pole.  The big Ox knocked me backwards and I fell hard. At the same time, he lost his footing and landed back ward on top of me. It was an accident. And yep, you guessed it, the fall and excess weight broke my arm just about four inches above the wrist! Ouch!  A broken bone in my forearm caused immediate pain. I had to support my injured arm with your other hand and went to the school office.  I knew they would call my mother. She came to get me. The injury began to swell and I could not rotate my arm without pain.  She took me to the local hospital for an X-ray. X-rays are the most common diagnostic imaging technique and can show if the bone is broken and whether there is displacement (the gap between broken bones). They can also show how many pieces of broken bone there are. The radius was fractured but not out of alignment. 

This was a simple fracture, but it sure hurt a lot.  The ER then sent us to the clinic to have a cast put on. I chose the color red because it was our school color.  They first wrapped my arm in cotton gauze.  They applied a rolled fiberglass bandage mesh over it. This synthetic material contains polyurethane and sometimes bandages are thermoplastic. These are lighter and dry much faster than plaster bandages. This would form a hard shell they would keep my arm in place while the bones healed.  It was not the old fashioned plaster cast I remembered a classmate having in first grade.  It smelled funny, I guess from the chemicals in it. But after a few days the smell went away.  I would have to wear it for about six weeks.  Sometimes it would itch.  I would have to take a wire hanger and scratch inside the cast.  I would also have to shower with my arm in a bag to keep it from getting wet.  A few times, I was in a hurry and just stuck my arm outside the shower curtain.  Friends at school, had signed it and after six weeks, I was glad to get the darn this off.  I looked funny with one skinny, white arm.  It would eventually return to it former look. My dad suggested riding with my arm out the car window so it would get tan in the sun.  This was his attempt at fatherly humor.